Tag Archives: coating

Building a better lithium-ion battery involves addressing a myriad of factors simultaneously, from keeping the battery’s cathode electrically and ionically conductive to making sure that the battery stays safe after many cycles.

In a new discovery, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have developed a new cathode coating by using an oxidative chemical vapor deposition technique that can help solve these and several other potential issues with lithium-ion batteries all in one stroke.

“The coating we’ve discovered really hits five or six birds with one stone.” Khalil Amine, Argonne distinguished fellow and battery scientist. In the research, Amine and his fellow researchers took particles of Argonne’s pioneering nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) cathode material and encapsulated them with a sulfur-containing polymer called PEDOT. This polymer provides the cathode a layer of protection from the battery’s electrolyte as the battery charges and discharges.

Unlike conventional coatings, which only protect the exterior surface of the micron-sized cathode particles and leave the interiorvulnerable to cracking, the PEDOTcoating had the ability to penetrate to the cathode particle’s interior, adding an additional layer of shielding. In addition, although PEDOT prevents the chemical interaction between the battery and the electrolyte, it does allow for the necessary transport of lithium ions and electrons that the battery requires in order to function.

“This coating is essentially friendly to all of the processes and chemistry that makes the battery work and unfriendly to all of the potential reactions that would cause the battery to degrade or malfunction,” said Argonne chemist Guiliang Xu, the first author of the research.

The smallest pixels yet created – a million times smaller than those in smartphones, made by trapping particles of light under tiny rocks of gold – could be used for new types of large-scale flexible displays, big enough to cover entire buildings. The colour pixels, developed by a team of scientists led by the University of Cambridge, are compatible with roll-to-roll fabrication on flexible plastic films, dramatically reducing their production cost.
It has been a long-held dream to mimic the colour-changing skin of octopus or squid, allowing people or objects to disappear into the natural background, but making large-area flexible display screens is still prohibitively expensive because they are constructed from highly precise multiple layers. At the centre of the pixels developed by the Cambridge scientists is a tiny particle of gold a few billionths of a metre across. The grain sits on top of a reflective surface, trapping light in the gap in between. Surrounding each grain is a thin sticky coating which changes chemically when electrically switched, causing the pixel to change colour across the spectrum.

The team of scientists, from different disciplines including physics, chemistry and manufacturing, made the pixels by coating vats of golden grains with an active polymer called polyaniline and then spraying them onto flexible mirror-coated plastic, to dramatically drive down production cost. The pixels are the smallest yet created, a million times smaller than typical smartphone pixels. They can be seen in bright sunlight and because they do not need constant power to keep their set colour, have an energy performance that makes large areas feasible and sustainable. “We started by washing them over aluminized food packets, but then found aerosol spraying is faster,” said co-lead author Hyeon-Ho Jeong from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory.

“These are not the normal tools of nanotechnology, but this sort of radical approach is needed to make sustainable technologies feasible,” said Professor Jeremy J Baumberg of the NanoPhotonics Centreat Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, who led the research. “The strange physics of light on the nanoscale allows it to be switched, even if less than a tenth of the film is coated with our active pixels. That’s because the apparent size of each pixel for light is many times larger than their physical area when using these resonant gold architectures.”

The pixels could enable a host of new application possibilities such as building-sized displayscreens, architecture which can switch off solar heat load, active camouflageclothing and coatings, as well as tiny indicators for coming internet-of-things devices.

It’s hard to believe that a tiny crack could take down a gigantic metal structure. But sometimes bridges collapse, pipelines rupture and fuselages detach from airplanes due to hard-to-detect corrosion in tiny cracks, scratches and dents. A Northwestern University team has developed a new coating strategy for metal that self-heals within seconds when scratched, scraped or cracked. The novel material could prevent these tiny defects from turning into localized corrosion, which can cause major structures to fail.

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENJOY THE VIDEO

“Localized corrosion is extremely dangerous,” said Jiaxing Huang, who led the research. “It is hard to prevent, hard to predict and hard to detect, but it can lead to catastrophic failure.” Huang is a professor of materials science and engineering in Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering.

When damaged by scratches and cracks, Huang’s patent-pending system readily flows and reconnects to rapidly heal right before the eyes. The researchers demonstrated that the material can heal repeatedly — even after scratching the exact same spot nearly 200 times in a row.While a few self-healing coatings already exist, those systems typically work for nanometer- to micron-sized damages. To develop a coating that can heal larger scratches in the millimeter-scale, Huang and his team looked to fluid. “When a boat cuts through water, the water goes right back together,” Huang said. “The ‘cut’ quickly heals because water flows readily. We were inspired to realize that fluids, such as oils, are the ultimate self-healing system.” But common oils flows too readily, Huang noted. So he and his team needed to develop a system with contradicting properties: fluidic enough to flow automatically but not so fluidic that it drips off the metal’s surface.

The team met the challenge by creating a network of lightweight particles — in this case graphene capsules — to thicken the oil. The network fixes the oil coating, keeping it from dripping. But when the network is damaged by a crack or scratch, it releases the oil to flow readily and reconnect. Huang said the material can be made with any hollow, lightweight particle — not just graphene. “The particles essentially immobilize the oil film,” Huang said. “So it stays in place.”

The study was published in Research, the first Science Partner Journal recently launched by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in collaboration with the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST).

Antireflection (AR) coatings on plastics have a multitude of practical applications, including glare reduction on eyeglasses, computer monitors and the display on your smart-phone when outdoors. Now, researchers at Penn State have developed an ARcoating that improves on existing coatings to the extent that it can make transparent plastics, such as Plexiglas, virtually invisible.

Plastic dome coated with a new antireflection coating (right), and uncoated dome (left)

“This discovery came about as we were trying to make higher-efficiency solar panels,” said Chris Giebink, associate professor of electrical engineering, Penn State. “Our approach involved concentrating light onto small, high-efficiency solar cells using plastic lenses, and we needed to minimize their reflection loss.”

They needed an antireflection coating that worked well over the entire solar spectrum and at multiple angles as the sun crossed the sky. They also needed a coating that could stand up to weather over long periods of time outdoors. “We would have liked to find an off-the-shelf solution, but there wasn’t one that met our performance requirements,” he said. “So, we started looking for our own solution.”

That was a tall order. Although it is comparatively easy to make a coating that will eliminate reflection at a particular wavelength or in a particular direction, one that could fit all their criteria did not exist. For instance, eyeglass AR coatings are targeted to the narrow visible portion of the spectrum. But the solar spectrum is about five times as broad as the visible spectrum, so such a coating would not perform well for a concentrating solar cell system.

Reflections occur when light travels from one medium, such as air, into a second medium, in this case plastic. If the difference in their refractive index, which specifies how fast light travels in a particular material, is large — air has a refractive index of 1 and plastic 1.5 — then there will be a lot of reflection. The lowest index for a natural coating material such as magnesium fluoride or Teflon is about 1.3. The refractive index can be graded — slowly varied — between 1.3 and 1.5 by blending different materials, but the gap between 1.3 and 1 remains.

In a paper recently posted online ahead of print in the journal Nano Letters, Giebink and coauthors describe a new process to bridge the gap between Teflon and air. They used a sacrificial molecule to create nanoscale pores in evaporated Teflon, thereby creating a graded indexTeflon-air film that fools light into seeing a smooth transition from 1 to 1.5,eliminating essentially all reflections.

“The interesting thing about Teflon, which is a polymer, is when you heat it up in a crucible, the large polymer chains cleave into smaller fragments that are small enough to volatize and send up a vapor flux. When these land on a substrate they can repolymerize and form Teflon,” Giebink explained.

“We’ve been interacting with a number of companies that are looking for improved antireflection coatings for plastic, and some of the applications have been surprising,” he said. “They range from eliminating glare from the plastic domes that protect security cameras to eliminating stray reflections inside virtual/augmented -reality headsets.”

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed tiny ultrasound-powered robots that can swim through blood, removing harmful bacteria along with the toxins they produce. These proof-of-concept nanorobots could one day offer a safe and efficient way to detoxify and decontaminate biological fluids.

Researchers built the nanorobots bycoatinggold nanowires with a hybrid of platelet and red blood cell membranes. This hybrid cell membrane coating allows the nanorobots to perform the tasks of two different cells at once—platelets, which bind pathogens like MRSA bacteria (an antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus aureus), and red blood cells, which absorb and neutralize the toxins produced by these bacteria. The gold body of the nanorobots responds to ultrasound, which gives them the ability to swim around rapidly without chemical fuel. This mobility helps the nanorobots efficiently mix with their targets (bacteria and toxins) in blood and speed up detoxification.

The work, published May 30 in Science Robotics, combines technologies pioneered by Joseph Wang and Liangfang Zhang, professors in the Department of NanoEngineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. Wang’s team developed the ultrasound-powered nanorobots, and Zhang’s team invented the technology to coat nanoparticles in natural cell membranes.

“By integrating natural cell coatings onto synthetic nanomachines, we can impart new capabilities on tiny robots such as removal of pathogens and toxins from the body and from other matrices,” said Wang. “This is a proof-of-concept platform for diverse therapeutic and biodetoxification applications.”

“The idea is to create multifunctional nanorobots that can perform as many different tasks at once,” adds co-first author Berta Esteban-Fernández de Ávila, a postdoctoral scholar in Wang’s research group at UC San Diego. “Combining platelet and red blood cell membranes into each nanorobot coating is synergistic—platelets target bacteria, while red blood cells target and neutralize the toxins those bacteria produce.”

Trapping light with an optical version of a whispering gallery, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a nanoscale coating for solar cells that enables them to absorb about 20 percent more sunlight than uncoated devices. The coating, applied with a technique that could be incorporated into manufacturing, opens a new path for developing low-cost, high-efficiencysolar cells with abundant, renewable and environmentally friendly materials.

Illustration shows the nanoresonator coating, consisting of thousands of tiny glass beads, deposited on solar cells. The coating enhances both the absorption of sunlight and the amount of current produced by the solar cells

The coating consists of thousands of tiny glass beads, only about one-hundredth the width of a human hair. When sunlight hits the coating, the light waves are steered around the nanoscale bead, similar to the way sound waves travel around a curved wall such as the dome in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. At such curved structures, known as acoustic whispering galleries, a person standing near one part of the wall easily hears a faint sound originating at any other part of the wall.

Using a laser as a light source to excite individual nanoresonators in the coating, the team found that the coated solar cells absorbed, on average, 20 percent more visible light than bare cells. The measurements also revealed that the coated cells produced about 20 percent more current.

A top NASA executive hired in April to guide strategy for returning astronauts to the moon by 2024 has resigned, the space agency said on Thursday, the culmination of internal strife and dwindling congressional support for the lunar initiative.

NASA has picked space technology company Maxar Technologies Inc as the first contractor to help build its Gateway platform in lunar orbit, a crucial outpost for America's mission to relay astronauts to the moon in 2024, the U.S. agency said on Thursday.

Microfossils of a globular spore connected to a T-shaped filament excavated in an Arctic region of northwestern Canada represent the oldest-known fungus, a discovery that sheds light on the origins of an important branch in Earth's tree of life.

A SpaceX launch already scrubbed once due to inclement weather was postponed again nearly 24 hours later on Thursday, this time for "about a week," in order to update satellite software and "triple-check everything," Elon Musk's rocket company said.

British livestock genetics firm Genus agreed on Thursday to license its know-how on virus-resistant pigs to Beijing Capital Agribusiness Co Ltd, which will seek regulatory approval for the pigs in the world's biggest pork market.

Elon Musk's SpaceX postponed its planned Wednesday night blastoff of a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the first cluster of satellites for his new Starlink internet service, citing excessive winds over the Florida launch site.

Brazil's agriculture minister will ask Chinese officials on Thursday to greenlight exports to the Asian nation of sugar made from genetically modified (GM) sugarcane, which is expected to be widely used in Brazil in coming years.

The Trump administration asked Congress on Monday to increase NASA spending next year by an extra $1.6 billion as a "down payment" to accommodate the accelerated goal of returning Americans to the surface of the moon by 2024.

The moon may be dynamic and tectonically active like Earth - not the inert world some scientists had believed it to be - based on a new analysis disclosed on Monday of quakes measured by seismometers in operation on the moon from 1969 and 1977.

While people and other vertebrates are color blind in dim light, some deep-sea fish may possess keen color vision to thrive in the near total darkness of their extreme environment thanks to a unique genetic adaptation, scientists said on Thursday.

Billionaire entrepreneur Jeff Bezos unveiled on Thursday a mockup of a lunar lander being built by his Blue Origin rocket company and touted his moon goals in a strategy aimed at capitalizing on the Trump administration's renewed push to establish a lunar outpost in just five years.

A fossil unearthed in northeastern China of a feathered dinosaur a bit bigger than a blue jay that possessed bat-like wings represents a remarkable but short-lived detour in the evolution of flight and the advent of birds, scientists said on Wednesday.

The detailed manual used by U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to land on the moon in 1969 is going up for auction in July and could fetch up to $9 million, New York auctioneers Christie's said on Wednesday.

NASA's launch of the Mars Science Laboratory -- hampered by technical difficulties and cost overruns -- has been delayed until the fall of 2011, NASA officials said at a news conference Thursday in Washington.

There has been much confusion and misinformation in recent weeks about our Consumer Products Inventory (CPI). Much of this confusion was sparked by a recent report from Friends of the Earth (FOE) on nanoscale materials in food, as well as news articles from Mother Jones and other outlets focused in on the use of nanoscale […]

The updated Nanotechnology Consumer Products Inventory now contains 1,628 consumer products that have been introduced to the market since 2005, representing a 24 percent increase since the last update in 2010. In addition to finding new products introduced to the market, the newly re-launched inventory seeks to address scientific uncertainty with contributions from those involved […]

The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention and the National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health are taking public comment on their plans for a new exposure assessment and epidemiological study of U.S. workers that are exposed to carbon nanotubes and nanofibers.

The Food & Drug Administration has released two new guidance documents for public comment outlining agency policy for the use of nanotechnology in food ingredients and packaging and the use of nanotechnology in cosmetic products.

The European Commission’s Science in Society Programme reflects on how to proceed towards Responsible Research and Innovation in the Information and Communication Technologies and Security Technology fields.

Today the Food Standards Authority issued a report on consumer attitudes to the use of nanotechnology in Food, drinks and other related products such as processing and packaging. The results, based on focus group studies, suggest that the public perception of nanotechnology in food is not negative, and is based on weighing up the benefits […]

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) have just posted a new video on the safe development of nanotechnology, featuring former PEN Science Advisor Andrew Maynard, as part of their series of nano educational podcasts.

A new PEN report provides the first ever analysis of voluntary initiatives to regulate nanotechnology. As nanotechnologies move forward, along with other emerging technologies, voluntary programs will play an important role in the governance portfolio available to the federal government as well as states and municipalities.

AOL News published a three part series on nanotechnology. “Nanotechnology has long been hyped for its potential to cure diseases, ease energy problems, supercharge our computers and more. But increasing evidence shows that the engineered particles could pose a giant risk to the environment and human life.”

A new paper makes a case for organizing collective responsibility through instruments beyond the regulatory system, such as codes of conduct and various deliberative assessment mechanisms within and outside the policy context.

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U.S. real estate title insurance company First American Financial Corp said on Friday it had learned of a design defect in one of its production applications that had made possible unauthorized access to customer data.

Amazon.com Inc shareholders overwhelmingly rejected a proposal that the company stop selling facial recognition technology to government agencies, while a resolution to audit the service drew more support, a regulatory filing on Friday showed.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's SpaceX has raised more than $1 billion in financing in the last six months as it aims to roll out an ambitious high-speed internet service by using a constellation of satellites to beam signals from space.

Slack Technologies Inc, the owner of the workplace instant messaging app, said https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1764925/000162828019007058/slacks-1a2.htm on Monday it had registered about 117 million of its Class A shares, which is an estimate for the number of shares that will be needed when the stock begins to trade.

Payment technology company Global Payments Inc is nearing a deal to acquire peer Total System Services Inc (TSYS) for about $20 billion in an all-stock deal, a source familiar with the matter said on Friday.

China's Huawei, hit by crippling U.S. sanctions, could see shipments decline by as much as a quarter this year and faces the possibility that its smartphones will disappear from international markets, analysts said.

Global tech firms, including chip suppliers, are cutting ties with China's Huawei Technologies Co Ltd after the U.S. government put the world's largest telecom equipment maker on a trade blacklist citing national security concerns.

China said the United States needs to correct its "wrong actions" in order for trade talks to continue after it blacklisted Huawei, a blow that has rippled through global supply chains and battered technology shares.

Japan's Panasonic Corp said on Friday it has not stopped any shipments of components to Huawei Technologies, a day after it originally called for a halt of transactions in line with a U.S. export controls against the Chinese firm.

Huawei handsets are drawing fewer clicks from online shoppers since the United States blacklisted the Chinese telecom company, according to PriceSpy, a product comparison site that attracts an average of 14 million visitors per month.

Poland has submitted a complaint to the European Union's top court against copyright rules adopted by the bloc in April to protect Europe's creative industries, which Warsaw says may result in preventive censorship.

Facebook increased the amount of content it restricted access to in Vietnam by over 500% in the last half of 2018, the U.S. social media giant said in a report released on Friday, as the Southeast Asian country ramps up its crackdown on online dissent.

The evolution of artificial intelligence is driving advances in technology but raising questions over ethics, the head of the OECD said on Wednesday, as more than 40 nations backed a set of principles meant to improve transparency around AI.

Amazon on Wednesday said shareholders rejected proposals to curb and audit its facial recognition service, just as members of Congress indicated there was bipartisan support to one day regulate the technology.

Grindr LLC's Chinese owner gave Beijing-based staff access to personal information of millions of Americans such as private messages and HIV status, according to eight former employees, prompting U.S. officials to ask it to sell the dating app for the gay community.

Nourish3d has customers fill out a questionnaire to discover what their diets are lacking. Seven-layered supplement "stacks" are then 3D printed and sent to their homes. Rough cut (no reporter narration).

Chinese telecoms giant Huawei is a favorite boogeyman for the Trump administration over cybersecurity fears. But Australian intelligence services were lobbying allies over the perceived threat to 5G long before it was on the Americans' agenda.

The latest trend in robotics and AI on display at this year's International Conference on Robotics and Automation isn't looking ahead to science fiction scenarios, but revolves around the fine-tuning of existing tech.

Robots made waves in the World Intelligence Underwater Robots Challenge in Tianjin in China last week, while a four-legged robot, which its engineer say can climb any terrain, showed off its skills in Paris. Pascale Davies reports.

Alphabet Inc’s Google has suspended business with Huawei that requires the transfer of hardware and software products except those covered by open source licenses, a source close to the matter told Reuters on Sunday, in a blow to the Chinese technology company that the U.S. government has sought to blacklist around the world.

If you’ve been out and about in Silicon Valley in the last month or so, chances are you’ve heard of “Alpha Girls,” a new book written by longtime journalist Julian Guthrie about four investors who’ve made a big impact on the world of startup investing. The book recognizes them — Theresia Gouw, MJ Elmore, Sonja […]

News just in from security reporter Brian Krebs: Fortune 500 real estate insurance giant First American exposed approximately 885 million sensitive records because of a bug in its website. Krebs reported that the company’s website was storing and exposing bank account numbers, statements, mortgage and tax records, Social Security numbers and driving license images in […]

When you watch 2001: A Space Odyssey, do you find yourself criticizing HAL 9000's machinations and thinking, "I could do better than that!" If so, Observation may be right up your alley. In it you play a space station AI called SAM that is called upon by the humans on board to help resolve a […]

Erik Finman is a twenty-something bitcoin maximalist as famous for his precocity as he is for his $12 bet on the currency a few years ago. Now, Finman, who built his first company while still in high school, is launching a new startup called CoinBits, which allows users to passively invest in bitcoin. The idea, […]

Livekick, a startup that gives customers access to one-on-one personal training and yoga from their home (or hotel room, or elsewhere), is announcing that it has raised $3 million in seed funding. The company was founded by entrepreneur Yarden Tadmor and fitness expert Shayna Schmidt. Tadmor said that with all his travel for work, his […]

Last night's successful Starlink launch was a big one for SpaceX — its heaviest payload ever, weighed down by 60 communications satellites that will eventually be part of a single constellation providing internet to the globe. That's the plan, anyway — and the company pulled the curtain back a bit more after launch, revealing a […]

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. WikiLeaks’ Assange charged under the Espionage Act in a ‘major test case’ for press freedom Julian Assange, founder of whistleblowing site […]

Imagine what $100,000 cash could do for your startup dreams. If you’re an early-stage startup founder determined to take your business to the top, it’s time to stop dreaming and get down to the serious task of competing in Startup Battlefield, our premier pitch-off that takes place at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. Step […]

A long-awaited service for readers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and some other overseas Chinese communities have finally come true: Amazon has just started offering Traditional Chinese books for its Kindle e-reader. The release filled an obvious gap for Kindle, which debuted back in 2007 and has been growing the number of languages it supports […]

To say that reaction to the first Sonic the Hedgehog trailer was mixed would be overly diplomatic. But at least fans were able to look beyond the thin premise and bizarre Jim Carrey turn for long enough to focus on what was really important: the weird-ass Sonic design. The latest in an increasingly frequent number […]

In the first few days following Luckin Coffee’s initial public offering, the stock chart for LK looked like a roller coaster. Now it’s looking more like a free fall. The Chinese Coffee chain successfully completed its highly anticipated offering roughly a week ago, raising more than $550 million after pricing at $17 per share, the […]

Starbucks plans to double its store count in China to 5,000 in 2021 and Luckin, a one-year-old coffee startup, is matching up by aiming to reach 4,500 by the end of this year. Luckin’s upsized $651 million flotation has brought American investors’ attention to this potential Starbucks rival in China, where the Seattle giant controlled […]

The shift to a new butterfly keyboard mechanism is Apple’s least popular design decision in recent memory. After a flood of negative feedback over stuck and malfunctioning keys, the company has continued to upgrade the technology with subtle fixes. Just two days ago Apple issued yet another update — one it believes will address many […]

Samsung is taking its time bringing the Galaxy Fold back to market. And frankly, that’s probably for the best. The Note debacle from a few years back was an important lesson about what happens when you rush a product back to market. That one resulted in a second recall — PR nightmare upon PR nightmare. […]

In an era when the smartphone can do everything, why do you need a standalone audio recorder? Roland, makers of music gear, might have an answer. Their R-07 voice recorder is about as big as an original iPod and is designed for music recording, practice and playback. It features two microphones on top as well […]

After admitting it had to modify some of its Jump electric bikes to fix braking issues — the same problem that had halted Lyft’s e-bike business — Uber is getting back on its bike, so to speak. Almost one year after nearly getting driven off London’s streets completely by losing its taxi operating license, Uber […]

A technique to substitute carbon-hydrogen species into a single atomic layer of the semiconducting material tungsten disulfide, a transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD), dramatically changes the electronic properties of the material.

Scientists have created 'plumbene', a 2D-honeycomb sheet of lead atoms. Plumbene has the largest spin-orbit interaction of any Group 14 elemental 2D material, potentially making it a robust 2D topological insulator in which the Quantum Spin Hall Effect might occur even above room temperature.